Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Psychologists from the United States are extremely prominent in psychological science, publishing more articles and receiving more citations than researchers from other nations. In this brief article, I review some previous research on this “nation gap” in psychology and highlight relevant data from journals published by the Association for Psychological Science. I then discuss some possible explanations for the nation gap and touch on some of its implications for thinking about scholarly merit and scientific eminence. I hope that the research and data discussed here will stimulate further consideration of the role of author nationality for both judgments of scholarly merit and psychological science more generally.

Keywords

scholarly merit scientific eminence publication metrics internationalization

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adair

J. G.

Huynh

C.-L.

(2012). Internationalization of psychological research: Publications and collaborations of the United States and other leading countries. International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation, 1, 252–267.

Arnett

J. J.

(2008). The neglected 95%: Why American psychology needs to become less American. American Psychologist, 7, 602–614.

Association for Psychological Science. (2016). APS member demographics. Retrieved from http://www.psychologicalscience.org/redesign/wpcontent/uploads/2017/02/APS-Demographics-Report-for-Website.pdf

Brown

A. J.

Goh

J. X.

(2016). Some evidence for a gender gap in personality and social psychology. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7, 437–443.

Campbell

F. M.

(1990). National bias: A comparison of citation practices by health professionals. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 78, 376–382.

Diener

Oishi

Park

(2014). An incomplete list of eminent psychologists of the modern era. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 2, 20–32.

Eagly

A. H.

Miller

D. I.

(2016). Scientific eminence: Where are the women? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 899–904.

Harris

Macinko

Jimenez

Mahfoud

Anderson

(2015). Does a research article’s country of origin affect perception of its quality and relevance? A national trial of US public health researchers. BMJ Open, 5, e008993.

Henrich

Heine

S. J.

Norenzayan

(2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33, 61–83.

10.

May

R. M.

(1997). The scientific wealth of nations. Science, 275, 793.

11.

Merton

R. K.

(1968). The Matthew effect in science. Science, 159, 56–63.

12.

Mongeon

Paul-Hus

(2016). The journal coverage of Web of Science and Scopus: A comparative analysis. Scientometrics, 106, 213–228.

13.

O’Gorman

Shum

D. H. K.

Halford

W. K.

Ogilvie

(2012). World trends in psychological research output and impact. International Perspectives in Psychology: Research, Practice, Consultation, 1, 268–283.

14.

Okike

Hug

K. T.

Kocher

M. S.

Leopold

S. S.

(2016). Single-blind vs double-blind peer review in the setting of author prestige. Journal of the American Medical Association, 316, 1215–1316.

15.

Sternberg

R. J.

(2016). “Am I famous yet?” Judging scholarly merit in psychological science: An introduction. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 877–881.

16.

Wargo

(2006, January). Everything old is new again. APS Observer, p. 19. Retrieved from https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/everything-old-is-new-again#.WIpmRbYrJ3

17.

Webster

G. D.

Nichols

A. L.

Schember

T. O.

(2009). American psychology is becoming more international. American Psychologist, 64, 566–568.

Scholarly Merit in a Global Context: The Nation Gap in Psychological Science

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References